“The consort of hubris was catastrophe. If there is one lesson that deserves to be drawn from the bloodstained decades stretching from 1914 to 1989, surely that is it.”
-- Andrew Bacevich
Many of the problems the United States is now dealing with arise directly from the inability of decision makers to rebut the Albright Question. As Andrew Bacevich so clearly writes in his book “The New American Militarism,” in the decade between Desert Storm and 9/11 few of the many global disturbances had any direct bearing on U.S. security. Despite this “the very fact that the world’s greatest military power faced so few threats to its own well-being made it difficult for American leaders to urn a blind eye to injustice, famine, and mass killing elsewhere.” With America’s victory in the first Gulf War having effectively preempted “any serious inquiry into why the nation needed forces in excess of those required for its own security—the Pentagon now found itself summoned time and again to ‘do something’ to relieve the plight of the suffering and the oppressed.” With no real conventional threats on the horizon and no real threat to of any actual cuts in military spending, the military seemed quite content to sit on its collective haunches and polish its weaponry. The public, on the other hand was not. “With Pentagon expenditures holding steady at 300 billion per year throughout the 1990s, it was incumbent upon the military to demonstrate some tangible return on that investment.” This desire was most clearly brought into focus by President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. “What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" she asked General Colin Powell.
America’s efforts to aid the world have done so little good not for lack of effort, but of rationality. The great “freedom fighters” we install like Castro tend to simply take after their predecessors. Our constant efforts to control ‘criminal’ regimes such as Iran, ‘bloodthirsty’ dictators such as Saddam, or even ‘dangerous’ ideas such as Communism sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. The successes bring temporary praise and are soon forgotten. The failures seem to bring near eternal scorn and condemnation. In such cases, whether we act or not we risk tragedy, but the weight of failed action rests more heavily on the shoulders of America than on any other. Despite this, for both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the military alternative made the gradual ascent from last resort to useful tool in a surprisingly short time. As early as 1992, Larry Diamond wrote that: “Democracy should be the central focus the defining feature of US foreign policy” and evidently Bill Clinton listened. Under his doctrine of forceful humanitarian intervention the U.S. military was involved in the largest number of foreign military actions under a single administration in American history. George Bush’s promise to reign in such peacekeeping operations quickly morphed into the move toward freedom making operations after 9/11.
Our reach should be consciously limited to that which we can, and should, grasp. As Henry Kissinger said, “Diplomacy is the art of restraining power.” Humility is not weakness, it is merely controlled power. When Teddy Roosevelt put forth the “Big Stick” doctrine America was still working out its muscles and it had yet to work up to the Louisville Slugger. Our choices were automatically bound by clear power limitations. During the Cold War, Soviet power worked as a restraint. Since the fall of the U.S.S.R., we’ve unquestionably had the biggest stick in the yard and everyone knows it. This knowledge has put us in the “Casey at the Plate mode.” For many, Iraq was the third pitch where, after digging himself into a 0-2 count out of sheer arrogance, Casey the Invincible swings for the fences…and strikes out. “Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright. The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light. And, somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout, but there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.”
Robert Art writes that, while promoting democracy where it is feasible is in the US interest, military force, 'is of little use' in this effort. He argues that:
The aim of spreading democracy around the globe . . .can too easily become a license for indiscriminate and unending U.S. military interventions in the internal affairs of others. Democracies are best produced, rather, by stalemating aggressor states, by providing a stable international framework that facilitates economic development and the emergence of a middle class within states, and by using economic and other types of leverage to encourage internal liberalization.
America and American policy makers must internalize our limits. We don’t need to follow a policy of inevitable reversibility, but we must limit our actions as if we did. The economy of force the U.S. military applies in places like Yemen and Columbia must guide our policy on the larger scale. “Don’t try to fix the whole society. Rather, identify a few key pivotal elements in it, and try to fix them.” Dennis Ross an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former Middle East coordinator under the Clinton administration writes that: “Statecraft is often about working to transform current realities so what is not possible today becomes possible over time.” It has been said that you cannot cross a chasm by leaping twice, but you can by climbing to the bottom and back up the other side. The small steps do not provide the immediate gratification of the great leaps, but they do avoid the dangers. Pragmatism calls for a foreign policy that puts forth a gradual approach of piecemeal reforms for troubled countries. It took Europe hundreds of years (and hundreds of wars, tyrants and turmoils) for the ground to be fertile enough to sustain “democracy.” The Rest will hopefully take the same path, and will hopefully find it easier going, but trying to drag all of them kicking and screaming (or plotting and scheming) will not make it happen any sooner, and will likely end up costing us some fingers.
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